I am a magazine columnist, book author, blogger and ghost writer who writes about entrepreneurship, marketing, business planning and corporate communications, emerging technologies, legal issues and more. The third edition of my latest co-authored book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook, was published in the fall of 2012. I write the “Ask a Geek” column for Entrepreneur magazine, the "EdTech Matters" column for Today's Campus magazine, and contribute to NewHope360.com. In addition to my writing, I sometimes develop and manage handcrafted strategic plans and marketing communications campaigns while guiding businesses in their efforts to leverage new and earned media in support of their goals and objectives. In this role, I provide business and others with counsel and content that enables them to define, leverage and manage their brands in ways that increase engagement and qualified inquires, develop trust and lift sales. Previously, I launched, managed and sold a Boulder, Colo.-based Internet start-up; worked in Acquisitions for John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (NYSE: JW.A) and Pearson plc (NYSE: PSO); and worked in a variety of staff and executive team roles for start-ups and not-for-profit organizations. I am a 1986 graduate of Keystone College (and I serve on that college's Board of Trustees), and I also attended The University of Houston.

Content Marketing Study Suggests Most Content Marketing Doesn't Work

Content marketing is a zero sum game, or so suggests a groundbreaking new content marketing study that should send shivers down the spines of business owners and content marketers alike. Only 10 to 20 percent of a company’s website content drives 90 percent of its web traffic, and only half a percent of a website’s content drives more than 50 percent of its traffic.

InboundWriter platform (click for larger view)

“Our research proves that in content marketing and online publishing, the subjective ‘hit or miss’ approach is a ‘miss’ 80 to 90 percent of the time,” said Skip Besthoff, CEO of InboundWriter, the company that conducted the study.

Besthoff revealed those numbers earlier today at the Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland, Ohio, saying they were generated in part by examining traffic patterns – measured via organic page views – for more than 110,000 pages and 32 million page views over dozens of websites from June 2012 through May 2013.

Adding insult to injury is the unsettling realization that the overwhelming majority of content marketers don’t understand why one piece of content fails while another may succeed, creating a situation that leads to more content being created. That’s because your average website – aided by an uninformed content marketer – is always attempting to gain lost ground. Or they’re hoping that a new piece of content will fall into the ‘hit’ category. In either case, your company’s investment in content rarely pays off.

“If I told you that only 20 percent of your content is doing anything for you in terms of traffic generation, you’d do one of two things,” said Besthoff. “You’d either fire all of your writers or you just wouldn’t publish anything that they’ve generated for you.”

Besthoff believes that the fight for an audience on the web is a zero sum game. “Only so many people are searching for a given topic or subject in a given month. Your business’ job is to drive traffic by writing on topics with a large potential audience by creating website content that helps the business stand above its competition.”

InboundWriter’s solution to the hit or miss approach of content marketing is quite simple in theory, but until now impossible to accomplish: Predictive analytics, which allow you to drive content performance – not just gauge it like a keyword research tool does. In fact, Besthoff said, that tool was never meant to be used for content marketing.

InboundWriter – which is a small, 10-person venture-backed startup based out of San Mateo, Calif. – has been working on a number of significant advancements to its platform and algorithms over the last several months. One of these is the ability to factor in where exactly a particular piece of content should be published in order to predict content performance.

In essence, the company’s latest content marketing toolset – released today and available online at InboundWriter.com – adds critical context and intelligence to what’s referred to as a pre-published “content score.” That score enables you to adjust your content prior to publishing it. In doing so, the company said, it has confirmed a statistically significant and quantitative relationship between the traffic that a piece of content generates and its InboundWriter content quality score. It suggests the company’s technology can be used as an indicator for accurately predicting content’s performance on the web.

If you’re interested in test-driving InboundWriter’s content marketing tool, the company offers three pricing tiers that make this easy to do.

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So, this pretty much just supports the 80-20 rule, suggesting that 20% of your content will likely drive sales/conversion. That’s what most companies realize is the effectiveness of content marketing (and a lot of other business driving strategies). A content-less presence on the web will only serve to hurt a brand, compared to a brand that publishes a lot of high quality content. It’s certainly not a “zero-sum” game.

While I thank you for weighing in, I take great exception with the claim that this article is an advertorial or anything similar. At Forbes, we do not accept payment to publish, and that is certainly not something I do, either.

I recommend in the future, you consider asking questions first, rather than assuming and slamming a writer and his publication.

Thank you for your comment. While I respect that you have an opinion on the quality of the article, I need to state for the record that this article was not an advertisement masquerading as such. This was well researched and reported on by myself and I stand behind it as is.

That others — including yourself — have chosen to take exception with the reporting, is okay. What’s not okay (to me at least) is that I have been accused here by you and others of ‘placing’ an advertisement in article form.

I choose to bring this to your attention because without defending my work, your words here remain unanswered, which would be short of the shame you suggest I am guilty of.

If I’m reading between the lines correctly, I’m seeing that many Content Marketers are trying to game the system just as SEO snake oil sellers have been doing for years. Yet another race to the bottom. What really matters, though, is relevancy to the potential customers who are seeking to fill their round holes with round pegs or cure their heartburn. One can be assured that Google will eventually slap down those who step outside the lines by using algorithms instead of real and relevant content.

On another front, marketing writers and direct marketers have known for decades that only a little of what is written hits the bullseye, and there are a multitude of different bullseyes depending on the product and prospect. Everything that is written is not golden, so the 20% number is not surprising. It’s the bottom line results that matter.

Before all the content marketers start hyperventilating, here are three things to keep in mind:

First off, the study focused on “dozens” of websites, so it could hardly be considered exhaustive.

Second, not all website content can be considered content marketing. In fact, most of it isn’t. Do your 404 pages count? What about your privacy policy?

Lastly, defining content marketing success solely in terms of traffic is a HUGE mistake, but one that a lot of companies make. Content marketing is about establishing credibility; about educating and informing an audience. If a piece of content results in a low number of pageviews, but has a high conversion rate with prospects, was it still a failure? Of course not.

I know they were trying to make a splash – and I’m sure it worked – but this study shouldn’t convince anyone that content marketing “doesn’t work.”

As I have mentioned in previous comments, this was not an advertorial. I took a lot of time to understand the issues at play here and wrote what I believed to be a fair look at a new piece of technology and a study conducted by the firm behind it. If that qualifies for “advertorial,” then so does any article doing the same, which I do not believe is the case.

20% effectiveness makes you a superstar in sales, so I don’t quite see the need for calling it a disaster when it happens in web marketing. Whne I consider all the print and web sorces I have for information in my industry, i do not begin to read even 20% of that content, it is always pick and choose based on whether the article appears to be something I want or need to know.

Since Twitter is such a popular site, it’s not surprising that many companies want to use it as a forum for advertising to customers. One of the advantages of social media advertising is the speed with which ads can be generated and posted, so it is interesting to hear about Twitter capitalizing on that and offering companies a faster self-service ad program.

Mikal–I had the same reaction many have had to the article, here’s why. Content Marketing is a hot topic today, and your headline draws a lot of attention by suggesting it may be a fool’s errand. Okay, you’re driving traffic to your content, which is fine. But then the story that’s delivered reveals the study is not even remotely objective, it was conducted by a company with a hugely vested interest in the outcome. That leads to the obvious questions: What was the methodology? What content was studied? Was it B2B or B2C? What sites were selected and why? None of which you answer to increase our faith in the study results, before giving over the lion’s share of the article to explaining the vendor’s value proposition and inviting beta testers. And hey: pricing comes in three tiers!!

Reading your passionate responses to critics, I can believe this wasn’t intended to be an ad. But it sure delivers a beautifully varnished story for the vendor, without answering the most critical questions about the validity of the study or its findings.